Beneficial Relative Permeabilities for Polymer Flooding
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines oil displacement as a function of polymer solution viscosity during laboratory studies in support of a polymer flood in the Cactus Lake reservoir in Canada. When displacing 1610-cp crude oil from field cores (at 27°C and 1 ft/d), oil recovery efficiency increased with polymer solution viscosity up to 25 cp (7.3 s-1). No significant benefit was noted from injecting polymer solutions more viscous than 25 cp. Much of the paper explores why this result occurred. That is, was it due to the core, the oil, the saturation history, the relative permeability characteristics, emulsification, or simply the nature of the test? Floods in field cores examined relative permeability for different saturation histories—including native state, cleaned/water-saturated first, and cleaned/oil-saturated first. In addition to the field cores and crude oil, studies were performed using hydrophobic (oil-wet) polyethylene cores and refined oils with viscosities ranging from 2.9 to 1000 cp. In nine field cores, relative permeability to water (krw) remained low—less than 0.03 for water saturations up to 0.42. Relative permeability to oil (kro) remained reasonably high (greater than 0.05) for most of this range. At a given water saturation, krw values for 1000-cp crude oil were about ten times lower than for 1000-cp refined oil. These observations help explain why only 25- cp polymer solutions were effective in recovering the viscous crude oil. In contrast to results found for the Daqing polymer flood, no evidence was found that high-molecular-weight (Mw) HPAM solutions mobilized trapped residual oil in our application. The results are discussed in light of ideas expressed in recent publications. The relevance of the results to field applications is also examined. Although 25-cp polymer solutions were effective in displacing oil during our core floods, the choice of polymer viscosity for a field application must consider reservoir heterogeneity and the risk of channeling/viscous fingering in a reservoir.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it